So, you know the new Toki Pona website, [url]tokipona.org[/url], which documents the book progress. Now, if you look at the HTML code, there is this part in annotations — which is ignored by the browser.

Yeah, it was up this morning. Its a kickstarter sort of idea. It's a good idea, I think it makes more sense to start taking orders when the project is pretty close to done given that jan Sonja has been working on this for 13 years and it appears things out her control have conspired to prevent a book from appearing (gainful employment for example

I wanted to buy the book when I was crazy about TP. Now, the craze has been gone, and I can't see myself spending $25 on a book about a language I already know with extras, like hieroglyphs and sign language that I will never use.

With the last line she lost a customer. I won't buy this.I just sent her an email to explain why.

Classical toki pona was more cultural neutral than the buzz around it suggested (you had to really look hard to see anything Daoist). Even if I was an anthropologist, there isn't a lot in the lexicon that ties this to a human experience, let alone any particular tribe.

mani, pan, len => cultural artifacts (unless mani is a biological category of animal distinct from soweli)jo => this with mani, I think are the only words that imply a system of property. Some language (e.g. Russian) still didn't have a similar verb (it doesn't now, but it isn't the preferred way to indicate possession)a distinction between soweli and jan => speciesismmi, sina, ona, mama => some egalitarian ideas about gender (making mama mean unspecified gender)meli, mije => but not so egalitarians as to omit gender altogetherolin, apeja => some definitions editorializing about human relations (namely that olin is between 2 people)kala, waso, soweli, kili, etc => some clues that we are on earth and part of biological system (i.e. not the language of sentient robots from planet Z)

There are words to indicate posessions in Russian, most general is иметь (to have), almost the same is владеть (to have, to have power on), and some compound statements, as, for ex. у меня есть (i have, literary "is near me").

janKalepa wrote:There are words to indicate posessions in Russian, most general is иметь (to have), almost the same is владеть (to have, to have power on), and some compound statements, as, for ex. у меня есть (i have, literary "is near me").

иметь get's used mostly for skills and владеть sounds like political stuff...both sound like legal jargon for possession of goods. Not a good sapir-whorf reason to say the Russians are predisposed to communism and public ownership, but it does harken back to the days when the Slavs were a hunting and gathering tribe and there wasn't much to own and there wasn't much reason to have a tidy way to express property rights.

janKalepa wrote:There are words to indicate posessions in Russian, most general is иметь (to have), almost the same is владеть (to have, to have power on), and some compound statements, as, for ex. у меня есть (i have, literary "is near me").

иметь get's used mostly for skills and владеть sounds like political stuff...both sound like legal jargon for possession of goods. Not a good sapir-whorf reason to say the Russians are predisposed to communism and public ownership, but it does harken back to the days when the Slavs were a hunting and gathering tribe and there wasn't much to own and there wasn't much reason to have a tidy way to express property rights.

All nations were a hunting tribes once. The Russian language usually have more than one way to express almost the same things, so with that posessions stuff. Иметь literary means "to have", I guarantee that and you are rightwith владеть use, it's more formal.

But not everyone has conserved their tribal grammatical patterns. Languages that went through a phase of being a creole (English is one-- it lost almost all it's interesting bits going from Old to Middle English)

Hmm, interesting, just looked up in Describing Morphosyntax (yup, it's the only book I use , and Paine notes that if a language has a verb, e.g. "to have", it will usually derive from the verb "to hold" or "to carry". So it looks like English's "to have" probably is derived from "to hold", ownership by merely having it in your hands. No discussion of which languages have strictly the abstract version, i.e. a verb that didn't grow out of proximity, holding or carrying.